News

Support of free software in public institutions:

At the Octave conference in
Geneva the presentation Support of free software in public
institutions: the KiCad case will be given by Javier Serrano and Tomasz
Wlostowski from CERN.

KiCad is a tool to help electronics designers
develop Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). CERN's BE-CO-HT section has been
contributing to its development
since 2011. These efforts
are framed in the context of CERN's activities regarding Open Source
Hardware (OSHW), and are meant to provide an environment where design
files for electronics can be shared in an efficient way, without the
hurdles imposed by the use of proprietary formats.

The talk will start by providing some context about OSHW and the
importance of using Free Software tools for sharing design files. We
will then move on to a short KiCad tutorial, and finish with some
considerations about the role public institutions can play in developing
and fostering the use of Free Software, and whether some of the KiCad
experience can apply in other contexts.

a commitment to freedom

In his message KiCad: A commitment to
freedom, Javier
Serrano thanks the KiCad supporters for their generous donations through
the CERN & Society Foundation.

CERN devs demo SPICE integration in KiCad

added by Javier Serrano on 2016-07-25 10:10:58.812603

Our colleagues Maciej Sumiński (Orson) and Tomasz Włostowski recently
submitted a proposal in the KiCad dev mailing list to integrate SPICE
simulation into KiCad, using ngspice as a shared library. The demo video
can be seen here.

On the way to stable release

added by Maciej Sumiński on 2015-11-25 18:35:09.166647

For sometime now, KiCad has stayed in the feature freeze state. It means
that instead of adding new features, we chose to focus on resolving
problems that surfaced during thorough tests, performed by the vast
KiCad community.
Thank you all, your help in this regard is very appreciated!

During the mentioned period, our team has fixed over 100 bugs (see
incomplete
list).
Now, when the Release
Candidate 2 is ready, we
are really close to the stable release. Stay tuned!

06-11-2013: EETimes article

The hardware fraternity at CERN believes that KiCad can do to PCB design
what the GCC compiler did to software, letting design and development
knowledge flow more freely in the open hardware community.
...
In order to achieve this goal, CERN is actively working on a set of work
packages targeted to bring KiCad up to par with the features of the
proprietary PCB tools required for designing complex multilayer and
high-density boards.

10-06-2013: Arduino donated to KICAD development

added by Erik van der Bij on 2013-06-12 10:18:26.308519

Arduino and many other projects share a similar philosophy of creating
free open source tools allowing more people to work with hardware and
software. Arduino is based on the contribution of many other open source
projects and supports several efforts in the form of donations. One of
the projects Arduino supports is the KiCad development project.